Virtual Works – Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology

"Beyond musical works: new perspectives on music ontology and performance What are musical works? How are they constructed in our minds? Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place? Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative potentials? Which alternative, more productive images of musical work can be devised? Virtual Works – Actual Things addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, questioning their authoritative foundation and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies and music pedagogy alike. Contributors: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Andreas Dorschel (University of the Arts Graz), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Kathy Kiloh (OCAD University, Toronto), Jake McNulty (Columbia University, New York), Gunnar Hindrichs (University of Basel), John Rink (University of Cambridge)

Against "the European notion of man": Levinas, freedom, and the responsible body

Emmanuel Levinas’ early essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” provides us with a clear description what Levinas’ conception of subjectivity as a lived, bodily experience rejects: “the European notion of man” (7). This paper traces the argument Levinas presents in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” providing links between this early essay and Levinas’ later, major works: Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The political interrogation of liberalism at the heart of Levinas’ depiction of the subject as creaturely and his discussion of subjectivity as substitution is revealed by orienting the later works towards “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Levinas’ description of the ethical relation between myself and all the others locates both my freedom and my responsibility to the other in the inseparable unity of body and spirit. As creatures, and as subjects in substitution, we experience our own freedom as dependent upon our responsibility for the others; unlike the subject of liberalism, the Levinasian subject cannot conform to the racist ideology promoted by the philosophy of Hiterlism without renouncing its own freedom